... hoping that the second line would mean "do backup on Sunday, but only if the date is between the 2nd and the 31st". I turns out cron does not AND its time arguments, but ORs them. So midnight between Tuesday the 18th and Wednesday the 19th, both a daily and a weekly backup was set in motion, regardless it not being Sunday. Incidentally, the daily "came first" and blocked the weekly.

Now, I could fiddle with the timing so that during the course of the day, the monthly backup always starts before the weekly, starts before the daily (e.g. at 00.01, 00.02 and 00.03), thus making use of the "blocking" phenomenon to achieve my goal. That is ugly, though, and every so often I would have to deal with error output that isn't really an error (a blocked backup).

Also, I could base my scheme solely on day-of-months. But a full backup taxes host ressources hard, so my users would really like the full backup to run in the weekend.

Any suggestions that doesn't require scripting? I'd like to keep the setup very basic for ease of future use and understanding. Moreover, different user groups will want sligthly different backup policies, and I don't like scripting small differences.

Is there any particular reason you don't want to use dedicated backup software?
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voretaq7♦Dec 19 '12 at 19:34

I actually am - We're using the built-in "db2 backup" functionality in conjunction with TSM. The reason why I am not scheduling the backup from TSM is that I am implementing a segregation of responsability. Often, my users want to kill a backup on grounds of performance. For the tables they want responsability for, I'm scheduling cron backup jobs that they can kill themselves.
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LANerdDec 21 '12 at 7:47

OK, I understand the motivation but I don't agree with the implementation -- Fragmenting your backups strikes me as a recipe for problems later. That said, mdpc's answer should work nicely
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voretaq7♦Dec 21 '12 at 20:59

I will keep that in mind. As of now, I'm trying to take apart a system that is hard to share responsability on. Later, maybe we will assemble it all again.
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LANerdDec 23 '12 at 19:36